I was watching a game of Rage Forest with Viper and saw that several people were trying to sneak through early on. I also saw that in the snow, units left tracks, but those tracks faded almost immediately.
Which got me thinking, it would be cool if the snowy terrain preserved tracks for longer. In some maps, you would need to guide your sneaky villager through the less snowy terrain to keep your moves a secret!
It would just be a fun little change to make snowy maps more than just an aesthetic change.
Would be great as a togglable setting in lobbies or maybe as a map specific thing. I assume different units leave different tracks (haven’t paid attention), if so that would be pretty cool too
IDK about lasting “indefinitely,” but 3-5X longer would be fine. Or have the decay rate of tracks be defined by a modifiable resource for scenarios/mods. The actual concept of tracking enemies is pretty cool, and IIRC the mechanic has been around since AoK/C, but the effect is too short-lived to be very useful.
I think rams leave tracks of wheels, but I’m not sure.
Anyway, it’s an interesting idea. Some civs could or UU could even receive a bonus for leaving no tracks, shorter lasting ones, or on the opposite have ennemy tracks appear longer. It obviously shouldn’t be the main bonus though, as it would only work on very specific map and would not be necessarily easy to use.
I don’t know if this is true, but perhaps the tracks lasting longer would become a problem in terms of computing power? Especially when lategame you’ll have hundreds of units passing through snow and creating tracks that the game has to remember and show.
Some new civ could potentially have a bonus where only they see tracks of somewhat recently passed units regardless of terrain (even on grass etc), as some sort of visual bonus to let you know that enemy units have passed by. Maybe for like, a North American civ maybe?
I guess it similar to how corpse works. With some MOD the corpse can last forever. Yes number of track and number of corpse are far different. But I think the game can decrease the density of track so that it won’t be too much, say the track leave every one second. And by observing the frequency of the track we know that the enemy is a horse or a infratry.